


Not Tired of the Dead

by Hecate



Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: F/M, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-04-28
Updated: 2014-04-28
Packaged: 2018-01-21 04:14:05
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,549
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1537115
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Hecate/pseuds/Hecate
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Allison wakes up with the memory of Derek's body lying at her feet, dead eyes staring up at her. (Takes place after season 3a, ignores 3b.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	Not Tired of the Dead

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Sandrine Shaw (Sandrine)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sandrine/gifts).



"Derek is coming back," Scott tells them. "I thought you should know."

Her father nods and she smiles, grateful for his trust in them. Because they're hunters and he's a wolf. Because when she looks at Scott these days, she doesn't see the boy she was in love with. She sees the alpha, and he is wearing Scott's face like a mask to hide claws and fangs and eyes of red.

She thinks her father sees the same, that he knows the very same thing, knows what the consequences should be, have been for years and generations. What it meant for her aunt and her mom and her grandfather.

But Scott is their alpha, as much as he can be, and she knows he thinks of them as pack sometimes. It's not what they used to have; it's better maybe, because they're all weapons now and the darkness is coming closer to Beacon Hills.

Derek is returning, and he's one more gun for Scott to draw. "Good," she says, and she smiles at the surprise on Scott's face. "We need him."

"Yeah," he answers, "I guess we do."

***

"What did you dream of last night?" she asks after her father left them alone.

Scott shrugs. "I don't really remember. Fire, I think. Smoke. Being in pain. Did you dream of Kate again?"

"Yeah." Allison looks away. "She killed Isaac again."

He reaches out for her then, his fingers soft against her arm, and she remembers all the ways he touched her before, all the things those hands on her skin used to mean.

"I'm sorry," he tells her; and she thinks he means the dream, means Kate dying, means her aunt being just like Gerard. And maybe he means all the parts of Allison that are just like this; a copy of her family, their smiles and their fingers on a trigger and their skin smelling of gasoline.

"I know," Allison says; and she's glad he understands these parts of her, thinks he might even forgive her for them. Even though she isn't certain she needs this forgiveness, his or any other's. She blames that on her family, too, a small escape she grants herself.

"Stiles dreamt of his mom." Scott's voice is suddenly sharper, harder, and she is the one to reach out now. His skin is too hot under her touch.

"Is he okay?" she asks, and knows the answer.

"No."

And she tries to breathe against the coming darkness.

***

They meet at a warehouse, their chosen headquarters, as much of a neutral ground as anything can ever be in Beacon Hills. Their impossible pack, lines that shouldn't have met and that run in circles and eights now. Humans and wolves and the lone banshee, guns and fangs and screams. By now it's strangely familiar.

Derek is there.

Allison nods in greeting but doesn't go to meet him. She still remembers her mother's smile, after all, and she sees Kate's face every night; and it hurts, even though the woman in her dream is not Kate, not really. It's something else, something meaner, and it scares Allison that she could mistake them for each other.

She still doesn't understand that Kate killed almost everyone Derek loved.

Scott and her father are standing with him, and Allison wonders when this became normal for her dad, when his hand stopped resting on his gun whenever the wolves were near. Wonders if he'd have an answer if she asked him.

In her nightmare, Kate is reaching for her gun.

***

She stays out of Derek's way; he stays away from her. They are allies now but that doesn't mean that much in the face of history, and being close to him makes her stomach go tight and her skin itch.

She thinks he might feel the same.

***

"I wish ghosts were real," Stiles says in the middle of math. "I'm fed up with my dead mother insulting me in my dreams."

"That's not her," Allison whispers, her eyes on the teacher, her body turned to him.

"Yeah," he answers, "I know. If it were, she'd ask about how I'm doing at school. She'd ask about Dad."

She takes his hand then, and thinks that maybe Kate's ghost wouldn't be too different to the nightmares she's having.

***

"Scott told me that you all have nightmares?" Derek asks her at the next meeting.

She nods.

"He dreams of fire and pain every night. Stiles dreams of his mother being angry at him, hating him. I dream ..." She pauses, looks at him. Breathes. "I dream of Kate. She kills the werewolves in my dreams. Deaton thinks it's because of us using visions to find our parents."

"The darkness inside of you," Derek says.

"Yeah."

"Every night?"

"Yeah."

"But you would do it again."

It's not a question, it's a statement, and she nods.

"Let's hope it doesn't kill you."

It's the first time that Derek surprises her since Kate showed her what he was. She thinks this new surprise might be worse.

***

Something is in the woods, something sharp and mean, and people are finding bodies again. Allison isn't surprised by it, nobody is, because they called the darkness into the town when they searched for their parents. Now others are paying the price, and Lydia's voice has gone raw from screaming.

She isn't sorry for what they did.

They chase after it during the day, following the traces through the trees, wolves and hunters, and she wonders what her mother would say about this. What Kate would say. Remembers Kate pointing her gun at Scott, remembers her mother's hatred.

She still misses them both.

"How much can you forgive family?" She asks Isaac because he might understand, because he loved his father despite everything.

He shrugs, looks over to the table where Derek stands with her father, where Peter leans against the wall with his ever-present smirk. "Too much, I think."

"Do you think Derek forgave Peter?"

Isaac looks back to her then, face fierce. "I hope not. We can't trust him."

"Of course," she answers, and she sees Kate falling beneath Peter's hands.

***

Sometimes Allison dreams of the woman she thought Kate to be, dreams of her aunt, and waking up is like falling into a nightmare. It's worse than the dreams the shared vision gives her, worse than seeing Kate as the cold-blooded hunter she turned out to be.

"She wasn't always like that," her father says when he sees her looking at pictures of Kate. "So filled with hatred. She loved you."

She tries to smile then. "I know. And Gerard..." She needs to stop there, can't speak of what she had done because Gerard made all those things seem right.

"I know," her father repeats.

"I would have turned out just like her," she says, and she wants her father to contradict her, wants him to lie to her face.

But he doesn't.

***

She finds some of Kate's things when she goes through the storage room they rented after France. She must have left them with Allison's dad ages ago because they seem to belong to a Kate Allison never met. An old edition of _Frankenstein_ , clothes that would fit Allison, a box with pictures, a silver bullet.

Allison briefly wonders why Kate left them behind, why she didn't throw them away if they weren't needed anymore. If they connected Kate to a past she wasn't ready to let got of, if her aunt had ever been that nostalgic and sentimental. Allison likes to think so.

She goes through the pictures, looks at Kate smiling, Kate laughing. Kate and her dad, Kate and Gerard.

Kate and Derek.

For a moment, everything stops, and Allison is staring at Kate and Derek, at his arms around her shoulder, at the smile on his face. The easy lines of their bodies, the places where their skin touches. They look beautiful. They look happy.

Before she knows it, Allison is on her feet and she's leaving, she's running down the hallway into the open. The sun and sky hit her like a fist, like the picture she just saw, and she's throwing up bile.

"What have you done?" she says after she's done, and her mouth tastes bitter and foul. “What have you done?"

***

She keeps it a secret, a dirty secret, and she wonders who knew, if anyone did.

Wonders if Derek kept a picture of them, too. If they're smiling in that picture, if it's the same Kate tucked away from the world.

Their group still meets up several times a week, planning and training, and it grates on Allison in ways it hasn't before. She thinks of the picture every time she sees Derek, sees the image of his smile flicker above his distant and serious face.

When he looks at her, Allison looks away.

***

Sometimes she thinks about comforting Derek, about reaching out and touching him. But she doesn't. She doesn't even like Derek all that much, hates him at times, and everything she could give him would be a lie.

Kate betraying them both doesn't connect them, and touching him won't bring her closer to her aunt. Because Kate is gone, and she wasn't a monster, not like Peter is. She won't return.

Sometimes, Allison wants to hurt Derek just like Kate did. Sometimes, Derek looks at her like he wants to see her die. Maybe those are the only moments when they're ever honest to each other, the masquerade of allies stripped away, and everything they truly are is pulled into the open.

She looks so much like Kate, Peter said before he killed her.

***

"You're a hunter, it's what people like you do," Derek hisses, his body between her and the dead man hanging from a tree.

She shakes her head. "It wasn't me. It wasn't my dad. We don't even know if hunters are behind this at all."

He laughs and she hates him, hates him for reminding her of what she did, of what she could still do. It hurts, all the fury beneath her skin, the grief that hits her when she thinks of her mother and Kate, the horror of the world she's living in.

"I know about you and Kate," she tells him just to hurt him back.

He stops laughing.

***

They stop talking for days. Nobody notices.

***

Kate is walking through her dreams again, a gun in her hand and a smile on her face.

"Allison," she says, and in her dream Allison steps closer to her dead aunt. "I got him this time," she goes on, pointing at the ground.

Allison wakes up with the memory of Derek's body lying at her feet, dead eyes staring up at her.

Her face is wet, her body feels cold. She isn't entirely sure why. But she hasn't been entirely sure of anything for quite a while now.

***

She goes though Kate's things again, her hands touching someone Kate might have been years and too many memories and lies ago. Allison puts some of Kate's clothes in her bag without knowing why, throws the picture of Kate and Gerard in a trash bag.

Takes the picture of Kate and Derek.

Their smiles are smooth under her fingertips as she traces their faces and their happiness. And in this moment, in this gray storage room, it feels real. She thinks that maybe it was for a little while.

Allison puts the picture in her bag, nestled between Kate's clothes, and when she leaves the building all she can think of is Kate's smile.

***

"The other hunters are asking about the Hale pack again," her father tells her, his voice still as hard and clipped as it was moments ago when he was on the phone.

She nods. She has no questions for him. She knows he didn't tell them anything.

Allison calls Scott instead, tells him about the phone call.

He laughs. It's not a happy sound. "There is no Hale pack," he says, and she can't argue his point, not after Erica and Boyd, not now that Isaac stays at Scott's side and everybody seems to be drawn to Scott. Even Derek.

She wonders when the hunters will start to call about Scott.

She runs into Deucalion in the elevator not much later and she can't be surprised by it. It's the kind of day she's having and she knew he was still living in the building. He nods at her, she returns the gesture.

They don't talk.

***

"I think she cared for you," she tells Derek, drunk on alcohol and the memory of the picture she found, the picture that she keeps in a drawer, buried under school notes.

Derek looks at her, and his face is set in a way she never saw on him before. "Yes," he says, and she doesn't wonder how he knew who she was talking about, "just not enough."

And she thinks of a house forever burning to ashes in his head, and she steps away from him. "I'm sorry," she tells him.

He shrugs. "It's not your apology to make."

Allison smiles then, smiles in the way that her mother once told her makes her look like Kate, and says: "I'm the only one who will."

'I'm the only one who can,' she doesn't say because sometimes she can't talk about Kate being dead. And she thinks that maybe sometimes Derek doesn't want to hear it.

***

She saves his life.

He saves her father's.

***

"We will never get back together, will we?" Scott asks her, the streetlamps reflecting in his eyes.

Allison doesn't try to smile for him, doesn't even consider denying the truth. They owe each other that much.

"It's okay," he says after a moment; laughs. "It will be okay," he corrects himself only seconds later.

And she remembers how much she loved him, knows that a part of her still does. But it's not enough for either of them. She isn't sure anything is. 

Not with wolves roaming the woods and monsters in every town. And she understands Kate for a moment then, understands how fear and desperation turned into hatred so sharp that she cut the whole world with it.

And she misses Kate, misses her and misses her.

***

"Did you love her?" she asks, and she is even more drunk than the last time they talked.

Derek doesn't answer. Allison is glad about that.

Still, she thinks he did.

Does.

When it comes to Derek, it's becoming harder to draw all the lines she used to be so familiar with. Past and present, wolf and hunter, anger and forgiveness. Just another consequence of stepping over them all the time.

***

She looks at herself in the mirror, takes in the teenage girl looking back at her. The girl looks tired, like she studied for exams until long after midnight, like she was out dancing too long.

It's the perfect lie.

It's a familiar lie, too, one she has used for a while now. And she's not the first of the family and not the only one to do so. Her parents playing normal, a businessman and his wife.

And Kate, forever her beloved aunt in her memory, and Allison is as obsessed with her as Kate used to be with hunting. It might be a family thing, this constant need to want something so badly, to focus until life is just details, the bigger picture erased.

It makes her wonder if she'll look even more like Kate when she's older.

She wonders what that would make Derek do.

***

The monsters come for them during the day.

Isaac loses his sight, Aiden loses his brother.

But they win, the victory as bitter as any that came before it.

She is almost used to the taste.

***

"Will you leave?" she asks him, leaning against a wall inside his apartment.

Around them, the others pretend to celebrate their victory, smiles and laughter and dances. But it's all fake, it's all ugly, and she thinks they should have waited longer until doing this. Three weeks weren't enough.

But it's a gratuitous idea. Time isn't enough to heal these wounds, to make this laughter real and the dancing joyous. It would always have been a bad joke, and maybe it's better just to put it behind them now.

"Why?" Derek finally asks.

Allison shrugs. "You left before. Twice."

"And I came back. I guess Beacon Hills just won't let me go."

It's a weird thing to say, marking this town as sentient, but maybe that is what it is. Maybe they have to kill this town to leave it alive.

***

“I used to hate Derek,” she tells Lydia. It's a painfully random thing to do. But she needs to say these things, she needs to tell somebody because they've been gnawing at her insides, a dumb ache that just won't quit.

Lydia looks at her. “You hated werewolves in general for a while.”

Allison shrugs.”Yes. But mostly, I hated Derek.”

She's glad Lydia doesn't ask when or why she stopped hating Derek. She's not sure there is any answer she could give.

Not until days later at least, when she sees Derek sitting at their table, Scott on one side and Isaac at the other. He is guiding Isaac's hands to the knife and fork, tells him where his plate is. 

It looks easy, unforced, and she thinks she would have failed at that, would have hesitated too much in her touch and with her words. And he smiles at Isaac, a sad little thing, no less true or fierce because of the grief around his eyes; and she thinks, 'There, that,' and she is glad she found her reason. And she doesn't mean the smile as much as what it means; all the ways he tries and cares and all the ways he is like Scott but isn't.

And she is scared.

***

She keeps on thinking about families, of all the deaths that stand between her and Derek, all the deaths that connect them. And she can't stop, Kate's ghost too real, and it pulls all the blood back to the surface in a new way.

Maybe she was always supposed to fall for him, painting hearts around his name in red. Maybe Kate did the same until she tore the paper out of the book and burned it.

She thinks, once, that it's a good thing that Derek's family is dead. Because Allison is an Argent, and everybody just needs a reason to be horrible and terrifying, and she has her aunt's talent for destruction.

But, Allison thinks, she could have been better than Kate. Looking at the town, at the pack, she thinks that maybe she is.

***

It's been weeks since the dreams ended, weeks since she saw Kate's face. Her dreams feel empty now, without purpose; and she has started taking sleeping pills that leave her dazed in the morning to cover up the disappointment she feels. She chases it away with black coffee, focuses on getting ready for school with the aftertaste bitter in her mouth.

She takes one look at the picture of Kate and Derek before she leaves for school. 

Peter was right. She really looks a lot like her aunt.

***

They celebrate Lydia's birthday; and it's not a party, not like the ones Lydia used to have. It's just them and alcohol and music, it's just them and the pretense of normalcy. But everybody is drinking and no one is dancing, and there are wolves among them and a knife in her bag.

'Maybe next year,' she thinks, and laughs to himself. 

She catches herself when she sees Derek looking at her, an eyebrow raised in question. She wonders when laughter began to be a reason to be stared at, and she thinks it might have been when Kate showed her what Derek was. Everything started with the two of them, so why not this as well?

She walks over to him, sits down at his side close enough to feel the heat and pressure of his body. She doesn't talk to him, not yet, she just turns to him and smiles. And it's the smile she has on her face when she looks at the picture that is all that remains of him and Kate, and it's the smile of a hunter who sees her prey.

It's a girl's smile, too, because that is what she is, what she could be, and sometimes her body and face remember. Sometimes she's Allison Argent, and her family name carries no meaning, and there never was a fire, and there are no wolves haunting the woods. It's a lie, of course it is, and it always shatters the way lies often do, but that doesn't make it any less true.

And Derek puts a smile on his face for her, a smile so much faker than the one on her own, and there is no resemblance to the way he looked with Kate. 

“I'm not Kate,” she says, and he nods.

“I know,” he replies, and he looks at her as if he was searching for Kate in her anyway; he looks as if he might search for all the days to come.

She tries not to mind.


End file.
